You have Gmail and your spam filter works badly? Hm, strange.
-- Alvaro On 18-01-2009, at 13:08, Andrew Gray <shimg...@gmail.com> wrote: > Those of you whose spam filters work as badly as mine are no doubt > familiar with the genre of 419 spam emails. You know the thing, "Dear > Respected Sir. I am the Minister for Trade of Nigeria, and I wish to > embezzle a BILLION dollars AMERICAN..." One element of these that you > occasionally see is "supporting evidence" - the writer tries to give > the impression the email is legitimate by linking to an entirely > respectable but irrelevant news story which proves the person they're > claiming to be actually exists, in the hope that this will make the > whole thing seem legit. > > Last month, I got one purporting to be from Maria das Neves, the > former Prime Minister of São Tomé and Principe. What immediately > caught my attention, as I went to hit delete, was that it linked not > to a newspaper article about her, but the Wikipedia article (which it > referred to as "my profile") > > This was on 15th December. And sure enough, if we look at the December > statistics for that page, we find that about four hundred people > followed the link over a couple of days: > http://stats.grok.se/en/200811/Maria_das_Neves > > There's a second, smaller, spike at the end of the month; a second > run? If we look back there's also one around November 24th, and one > yesterday (January 17th). > > An entirely unexpected application of stats.grok.se, there! > > On a more relevant content note, it seems most of these "waves" led > people to add warnings about it to the article: > > http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maria_das_Neves&diff=258161984&oldid=251397327 > http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maria_das_Neves&diff=260979984&oldid=258164279 > http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maria_das_Neves&diff=264791843&oldid=262290274 > > ...so the "you can edit" idea must be getting fairly apparent even > among people who read spam :-) > > -- > - Andrew Gray > andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk > > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l